While discussing the advantages and challenges of storing digital 4K footage over a very long period of time I remembered the S3 service offered by Amazon.com.

What Amazon.com does is offer space in their data centers across the world to store your data. And they do this at a very reasonable price point. Currently it costs $0.15 per GB and month and $0.20 once for uploading the data.

1h of RED RAW will take about 100GB. I imagine Cineform RAW to be about the same and consider Cineform RAW/Intermediate as my final digital master format. That means my 1:30h, Oscar winning feature film will take 150GB.

Using the Amazon S3 to store my master (in an 2048bit encrypted format) will cost me $22,5 a month. With all the guarantees of Amazon for fail-safeness and other stuff. It is immediately available to everybody with an internet connection all over the world if give them access privileges and share my encryption keys with them.

And this is just the first of a number of mass storage offerings coming up. Google is about to launch a similar service in the near future I guess, so we will see prices drop further.